The RODRIGO database

N. Serrano, F. Castro, A. Juan

DSIC/ITI, Universitat Politècnica de València

Camı́ de Vera, s/n, 46022 València, SPAIN
{nserrano,francas,ajuan}@iti.upv.es
Abstract
Annotation of digitized pages from historical document collections is very important to research on automatic extraction of
text blocks, lines, and handwriting recognition. We have recently introduced a new handwritten text database, GERMANA,
which is based on a Spanish manuscript from 1891. To our knowledge, GERMANA is the first publicly available database
mostly written in Spanish and comparable in size to standard databases. In this paper, we present another handwritten
text database, RODRIGO, completely written in Spanish and comparable in size to GERMANA. However, RODRIGO
comes from a much older manuscript, from 1545, where the typical difficult characteristics of historical documents are
more evident. In particular, the writing style, which has clear Gothic influences, is significantly more complex than that
of GERMANA. We also provide baseline results of handwriting recognition for reference in future studies, using standard
techniques and tools for preprocessing, feature extraction, HMM-based image modelling, and language modelling.

1. Introduction this case, we have selected a manuscript much older

There are huge historical document collections resid-
ing in libraries, museums and archives that are cur-
rently being digitized for preservation purposes and to
make them available worldwide through large, on-line
digital libraries. The main objective, however, is not to
simply provide access to raw images of digitized doc-
uments, but to annotate them with their real informa-
tive content and, in particular, with text transcriptions.
However, automatic extraction of text blocks, lines,
and handwriting recognition are still open research
problems (Ramos et al., 2010; Likforman-Sulem et al.,
2007; Bertolami and Bunke, 2008).
In (Pérez et al., 2009), we presented a new handwrit-
ten text database, GERMANA, to facilitate empirical
comparison of different approaches to automatic ex-
traction of text blocks, lines, and handwriting recog-
nition. GERMANA is the result of digitizing and an-
notating a 764-page Spanish manuscript from 1891,
in which most pages only contain nearly calligraphed
text written on ruled sheets of well-separated lines.
To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available
database for handwriting research, mostly written in
Spanish and comparable in size to standard databases
such as IAM (Marti and Bunke, 2002; Su et al., 2007).
In this paper, we present another handwritten text
database, which will be referred to as RODRIGO. In
Work supported by the EC (FSE), the Spanish Gov-
ernment (MEC, MICINN, ”Plan E”, under grants
MIPRCV ”Consolider Ingenio 2010” CSD2007-00018,
iTransDoc TIN2006-15694-CO2-01, MITTRAL TIN2009-
14633-C03-01 and FPU AP2007-02867) and the Generali-
tat Valenciana (grant Prometeo/2009/014).
than that of GERMANA, from 1545, which is pub-
licly available in digitized form, at 300dpi in true col-
ors, from the Spanish “Ministerio de Cultura” web
site (Rod, 2006). The original manuscript is a 853-
page bound volume, entitled “Historia de España del
arçobispo Don Rodrigo”, and completely written in
old Castilian (Spanish) by a single author. We care-
fully annotated all text blocks, lines and transcriptions,
resulting in approximately 20K lines and 231K run-
ning words from a lexicon of 17K words, that is, very
similar to GERMANA in size. The main purpose of
this work is to let this annotation known to researchers
and to provide an adequate reference for future stud-
ies. The interested reader can download it from (Rod,
2010).
As GERMANA, RODRIGO is not a particularly dif-
ficult task for text and block line detection since most
pages only contain a single text block of nearly cal-
ligraphed handwriting on well-separated lines. It is
also a single-author manuscript on a limited-domain
task and, easier than GERMANA, it is only written
in Spanish. Nevertheless, RODRIGO comes from a
much older manuscript, and thus the typical difficult
characteristics of historical documents are more evi-
dent. In particular, the writing style, which has clear
Gothic influences, is significantly more complex than
that of GERMANA.
In what follows, we first describe the manuscript and
the database in Sections 2 and 3, respectively. Then, in
Section 4, some preliminary results are reported using
a standard, HMM-based recognizer. Finally, conclu-
sions and future work are discussed in Section 5.

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 2. The manuscript
As said above, the RODRIGO database corresponds to
a manuscript from 1545 entitled “Historia de España
del arçobispo Don Rodrigo”, and completely written
in old Castilian (Spanish) by a single author. It is a
853-page bound volume divided into 307 chapters de-
scribing chronicles from the Spanish history. Most
pages only contain a single text block of nearly cal-
ligraphed handwriting on well-separated lines. This
can be seen in Fig. 1, where it is also apparent that
writing style has clear Gothic influences (Millares and
Ruiz, 1983).
Other characteristic details of RODRIGO that can be
clearly appreciated in Fig. 1 are:
• The author tends to embellish the writing, spe-
cially in broad white spaces, resulting in the ex-
tension of some ascenders and descenders across
whole words.
• Natural blank spaces between successive words
are often omitted; e.g., the words “de la” are writ-
ten as a single word “dela” in the third line from
the bottom of page 15. Sometimes, on the con-
trary, artificial blank spaces are inserted within a
single word; e.g., the word “llegaronse” is writ-
ten as two words, “llegaron se”.
• Each chapter should begin with a dropcap, but
the manuscript contains no dropcaps, probably
because it was never brought to an artist to do
so. Instead, there is a blank area in each position
where a dropcap should have been inserted and,
in most cases, the corresponding letter is written
in small size.
• The first words in each even page are also copied
in the bottom right corner of its preceding page.
3. The database
The manuscript was carefully digitized by experts
from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, at 300dpi in
true colors, and it is publicly available at (Rod, 2006).
As with historical documents in general, scanned
pages have noise effects like spots, tears, ink fading
and transparency of back side. Also, they show a
slight warping due to book binding. Nevertheless, the
manuscript can be easily read and thus we decided
not to apply any preprocessing to it (apart from de-
saturation) for ground-truth annotation.
We followed an annotation procedure very similar to
the one used for the GERMANA database (Pérez et
al., 2009). First, all text blocks were annotated with
minimal enclosing rectangles and, within each text
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block, each text line was marked by its (straight) base-
line. This was done semi-automatically by means
of the GIDOC prototype (Serrano et al., 2010). All
blocks and baselines automatically detected were also
manually supervised, and corrected when needed.
On the other hand, the whole manuscript was tran-
scribed line by line, by a paleography expert, in ac-
cordance with the following transcription rules:
• Page and line breaks are copied exactly.
• Missing natural blank spaces between successive
words are indicated by the symbol “⌣ ”.
• Inserted artificial blank spaces within words are
indicated by the symbol “ ”.
• No spelling mistakes are corrected.
• No case or accentuation change is done.
• Punctuation signs are copied as they appear.
• Word abbreviations are first copied verbatim, ex-
cept for sub-indixes and super-indixes, which
are written in LATEX-like notation as {sub} and
ˆ{super}, respectively. Then, they are fol-
lowed by the corresponding word between brack-
ets. Thus, for instance, qi er. is transcribed as
qˆ{i}er[quier].
• The symbol ”$” is appended to each line having
a broken word at its end.
The total time required for a single expert to man-
ually annotate (text blocks, baselines and transcrip-
tions of) the whole manuscript was estimated as 500
hours; that is, approximately 35 minutes per page on
average. The complete annotation of RODRIGO is
publicly available, for non-commercial use, at (Rod,
2010). It comprises about 20K text lines and 231K
running words from a lexicon of 17K words, which
is comparable in size to standard databases such as
IAM (Marti and Bunke, 2002; Su et al., 2007). It is
worth noting that more than half of the words in the
lexicon (54.4%) are singletons (hapax legomena), but
they only account for a 4.1% of the running words.
Please see Table 1 for more details.
4. Experiments
As discussed in the introduction, RODRIGO is intro-
duced to facilitate comparison of different approaches
to automatic extraction of text blocks, lines, and hand-
writing recognition. In this section, however, we will
restrict ourselves to (automatic) transcription (hand-
writing recognition). More specifically, our aim is
simply to provide baseline results for reference in fu-
ture studies, using standard techniques and tools; i.e.,
 Figure 1: Pages 15 and 16 of RODRIGO.

Pages 853 a block of lines or pages, all supervised transcriptions

Lines 20357
Running words 232K
Perplexity 166
Lexicon size 17.3K
Singletons (%) 54.4
Character set size 115
Table 1: Basic statistics of the RODRIGO text tran-
scriptions (with isolated punctuation signs and ab-
breviations substituted by their corresponding words).
Perplexity was computed using a bigram language
model and a 100-fold cross-validation experiment.
Singletons refers to words occurring exactly once.
HMM-based text image modeling and n-gram lan-
guage modeling (Pérez et al., 2009).
Due to its sequential book structure, the very basic
task on RODRIGO is to transcribe it line by line, from
the beginning to the end. We assume that an auto-
matic transcription system is used, and that each (auto-
matically) transcribed line is supervised and, if neces-
sary, amended by an expert. Clearly, after processing
may be very well used for better (re-)training of im-
age and language models, and thus improving system
accuracy (Serrano et al., 2010).
Taking into account the above discussion, we divided
RODRIGO into 20 consecutive blocks of 1000 lines
each (1 − 1000, 1001 − 2000, . . . , 19001 − 20357).
Then, from block 1 to 19, the system was (re-)trained
using all preceding blocks, with block 2 also used for
further adjustment of a few, key parameters. After
each retraining, the system accuracy was measured in
terms of Word Error Rate (WER) on both, the next
block to supervise and the last block. The resulting
curves are shown in Fig. 2. Also shown is the part of
the WER due to the occurrence of out-of-vocabulary
(OOV) words.
As expected, the WER on the last block decreases as
the amount of training data increases. Interestingly,
however, the WER on the next block curve reveals
considerable fluctuations in the recognition complex-
ity of intermediate blocks. Nevertheless, this curve
also tends to decrease and, indeed, both curves con-
verge to a WER around 36.5% for block 20. We think

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80 WER on last block
OOVs on last block
WER on next block
70
OOVs on next block
60
50
40
30
20
10
Training Lines
0
1000 5000 10000 15000 19000
Figure 2: Transcription Word Error Rate (WER) on
RODRIGO as a function of the blocks of (1000 lines)
already supervised and thus available for training
(Training lines). The WER is computed for both, the
next block to supervise (solid line with black circles)
and the last block (lines 19001 − 20357). Also shown
is the part of the WER due to the occurrence of out-
of-vocabulary (OOV) words (dashed lines).
that this WER is not too bad for effective computer-
assisted transcription, though for sure there is room
for significant improvement. Note that, as can be ob-
served from the OOV curves, many errors are caused
by the occurrence of out-of-vocabulary words.
5. Conclusions and future work
A new handwritten text database, RODRIGO, has
been presented to facilitate empirical comparison of
different approaches to text line extraction and off-line
handwriting recognition. RODRIGO is completely
written in old Castilian (Spanish) by a single author
and comparable in size to standard databases. Some
preliminary empirical results have been also reported,
using standard techniques and tools for preprocess-
ing, feature extraction, HMM-based image modeling,
and language modeling. Although we think that there
is room for significant improvements, the word er-
ror rates obtained are already acceptable for effective
computer-assisted transcription. For future work, we
plan to also provide annotated data in accordance with
the guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Inter-
change of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium.
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6. References
R. Bertolami and H. Bunke. 2008. Hidden Markov
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